Chris Avenir, a first-year chemical engineering student at
Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, is facing academic expulsion after
being called out as the administrator for a Facebook-based Chemistry study
group. Titled “Dunegons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions,” after a campus
engineering study room dubbed “The Dungeon,” Avernir’s group had 146 other
students who used it to swap tips on homework and test questions in the school’s
chemistry program.

The study group was discovered by school administrators over
the winter break, resulting in a professor changing his class grade from a B to
an F. He was also charged with 147 counts of academic misconduct and
recommended for expulsion: one count for running the group, and a 146 more for
each student involved.

“What we did wasn’t any different than tutoring, than
tri-mentoring, than having a library study group,” said Avenir in an interview
with the Ryerson campus newspaper, The
Eyeopener. “I’m being charged with something I didn’t commit.”

Students expressed outrage at the university’s decisions,
accusing administrators of overstepping their bounds. “The university is interfering
in students’ personal lives,” said third-year student and student government
member Salman Omer. “This is an infringement of our rights.”

University administrators defended their decision to
recommend Avenir for expulsion, emphasizing the need for a “tough
approach to online cheating.” James Norrie, Director of the school’s
Information Technology program, feels students are trying to paint the issue as
a generational one when it’s not.

“We are not a bunch of old farts who are afraid of
technology,” said Norrie. “The issue is that it doesn’t matter where [cheating]
happens, we will pursue it … the code is clear that someone who enables others
to cheat will receive a severe penalty.”

Ryerson’s policy on academic integrity – currently in the
process of being updated – defines cheating as “any deliberate activity to gain
academic advantage, including actions that have a negative effect on the
integrity of the learning environment.”

Avenir denies accusations of cheating, noting that the group
did not contain complete or satisfactory solutions to homework and test
questions, only the same things “we would say to each other if we were sitting
in the Dungeon.”

“If this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and
all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in
tutorials.”

Chatter on Avenir’s group included things like, “Remember
what to do when you have positive cations (a type of positively charged ion)?”
says student advocate Kim Neale, who will represent Avenir at his upcoming expulsion
hearings.

“All these students
are scared s***less now about using Facebook to talk about schoolwork, when
actually it's no different than any study group working together on homework in
a library,” said Neale. “It's creating this culture of fear, where if I post a
question about physics homework on my friend's [profile] and ask if anyone has
any ideas how to approach this – and my [professor] sees this, am I cheating?”

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